Introduction to data mining for medical informatics

Data mining consists of a series of techniques for the discovery of patterns in large databases. This article provides an introduction to common data mining techniques with a view toward their use. The article begins by describing methods for discovering and exploring associations in observations and variables. The discussion then turns to methods for prediction. These techniques discover relationships between sets of variables. The article concludes with a description of evaluative techniques that are useful for assessing the results from data mining.